SAP ABAP

ABAP stands for Advanced Business Application Programming and it’s a high level programming language used in SAP for the development and other customization processes. Normally a transaction code is used for executing an ABAP program. For example we can use the transaction code VA01 for creating a sales order.

ABAP used to be an abbreviation of Allgemeiner Berichtsaufbereitungsprozessor, the German meaning of “generic report preparation processor” , but was later renamed to Advanced Business Application Programming. ABAP was one of the first languages to include the concept of Logical Databases (LDBs), which provides a high level of abstraction from the basic database level(s).ABAP is one of the many application-specific fourth-generation languages (4GLs) first developed in the 1980s. It was originally the report language for SAP R/2, a platform that enabled large corporations to build mainframe business applications for materials management and financial and management accounting.

This example contains two statements: REPORT and WRITE. The program displays a list on the screen. In this case, the list consists of the single line “Hello World”. The REPORT statement indicates that this program is a report. An alternative statement, PROGRAM, would be used for a module pool.Formatting rules:

The basic formatting rules of ABAP are simple:

Every ABAP statement must end in a period

Tokens within a statement must be separated by at least one space

An end of line is equivalent to a space

Statements and keywords are not case-sensitive

The “Hello World” program could be legally rewritten as follows:

REPORT tESt. WRITE
‘Hello World’ .

Comments

ABAP has 2 ways of defining text as a comment:

An asterisk (*) in the leftmost column of a line makes the entire line a comment
A double quotation mark (“) anywhere on a line makes the rest of that line a comment